Speculative Fiction Archives - Page 2 of 4

The Devil\’s Children

by Peter Dickinson

This one was a bit odd. It\’s apocalyptic fiction where humanity is seized by some kind of mass infectious horror of machinery. They smash cars and radios, go berserk in riots against technology and then flee cities en masse. Disease plagues spread and society breaks down with small groups of people surviving in isolation, wary of outsiders.

However most of the book isn\’t actually about that- it\’s only described briefly in the forward and epilogue, with a few instances where the main character herself is seized by a mindless urge of violence when she sees someone try to start a bus, for example, or hears someone talk about farm equipment or radios by name. She\’s ten or twelve, I was never sure of the age, and lost her family in a riot. She attaches herself to a travelling group of Indian Sikhs, originally immigrants. For some strange reason people of other nationalities were not affected by the madness against machines, only the English. The Sikhs let her join them as a kind of insurance, they call her their \”canary\” because she can tell them what kind of actions or conversation will trigger the rage of their English neighbors. They set up a community on abandoned farmland but then have to deal with nearby English group who have formed themselves into a feudal system. These neighbors are suspicious and afraid of the Sikhs, even rumoring them to be Old Ones or Fae. Most of the story is about the girl\’s adjustment to living among people foreign to her- I\’m not sure how accurately it describes Sikh culture but it depicted them as very honorable and relatively proud people. In the later part of the book, the girl takes a key role in their dealings with the English group, being a go-between and carrying messages, then later forming key strategies when it ends up in a battle. It seemed a bit improbable that a young kid would have such a leading role in strategies against the enemy, but what do I know. However I was doubtful enough that it kind of flattened my enjoyment of the story.

I got this book on swap because I acquired its sequel at a hotel, and wanted to read the series in order. Turns out this one was rather lackluster for me, but luckily the second one seems to stand on its own and I\’m already enjoying it more.

Nothing to do with the story itself, but I did really like the decoration on the cover and chapter headings, which has a medieval or celtic-looking pattern intertwining with gear cogs.

Rating: 2/5 187 pages, 1970

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Current Reads, Juvenile Fic, Speculative Fiction

Winter\’s Tales

by Isak Dinesen

A book I\’ve had to read in pieces, it\’s kinda slow going. These short stories are thoughtful, romantic in the old sense of the word, and very introspective. I had to read them slowly because the style is very different from modern narrative prose- a lot about each character\’s inner thoughts and perceptions of the world and their past relationships to other people and their half-formed dreams of the future and so on- there is very little conversation and nothing much seems to happen until you get to the end when there is a often a sudden inexplicable connection to something else, which makes you sit up and take notice. The endings can be very odd, and often leave the reader with more questions- I frequently had a wait, what? type of response.

There is a story about an adopted child who naturally assumes himself to be from a grand family, even though he was raised in squalor, and the gracious airs he puts on affects everyone around him. There is a story about a pastor\’s daughter who helps her orphaned cousin (adopted into the household) fulfill his wish to run away to sea- meeting their disaster together. A young sailor rescues a falcon that tangled itself in the rigging, and later his compassionate act is repaid in a strange manner, when he runs afoul of some drunken men while trying to court a young girl in a town their ship stops at. A king muses on his past actions and friendships, rides down to the sea to speak to a hermit who used to be in his service, and finds something unexpected when a fish is presented to him for a meal. A young man falls in love with a beautiful lady at a resort (such establishments were called \”the watering place\” in these stories, which sounded quaint) only to find out all his assumptions about her position in life were wrong. And so on.

It\’s hard to describe these stories. They feel very old-fashioned, most are set in a time period well before Dinesen\’s own day, and I believe she meant to infuse them with an archaic feeling. They are often solemn. The viewpoints in them sometimes baffled me- not just the stern religious feeling and ideas about God, but also the rather stereotypical notion that poor people felt content with their lot in life and were simple, dull folk and that on the other hand folk born into high station felt an inherent nobility- even if they had not been raised in a grand household. Hm.

I\’m not sure if I can say I enjoyed these stories, but they certainly made me think and the mood in them is very tangible, like a dark landscape that presses on you. Many of them have a fantastic element just a bit removed from normalcy, which is more unsettling and surprising than delightful or wondrous. I feel like I ought to read them all over again just to puzzle out the characters\’ separate motives and try to understand what was the point.

In case you are unaware, Isak Dinesen is the author\’s pen name. She is Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa. Which was a much easier read and has long one of my favorites, by the way.

Rating: 3/5 313 pages, 1942

more opinions:
A Striped Armchair
Like Fire

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Current Reads, Short Stories, Speculative Fiction

Wither

by Lauren DeStefano

In the not-so-far future, every continent apart from North America has been annihilated by nuclear warfare. For a time afterwards America was like a utopia- cancer and other diseases erradicated, only perfectly healthy babies born due to genetic manipulation. Then the dark reality sets in- those born in the next generation die in their early twenties. All of them.

What this means for the story is that our main character finds herself kidnapped at age sixteen, taken to a mansion and coerced, along with three other girls, to marry a wealthy man who is among the desperate- they want to breed as many children as possible in hopes of finding a cure before humanity dies out. The main character is one of these girls kidnapped to be a bride. She is suddenly jerked from being in poverty and uncertainty to living in luxury and being well-cared for. But she isn\’t free, she\’s not happy, and she knows when she\’s going to die…

It\’s an interesting idea, but this one didn\’t work for me. The characters were uninteresting. I never got a sense of them as real people. And I didn\’t quite buy the premise. If everyone was suddenly dying young, would the reaction of wealthy men really be to kidnap young girls and marry them in order the get lots of progeny? To me it was an odd idea. Another issue I had was that the story is told a lot in flashbacks, so the background events are revealed in pieces. I prefer my narrative to be linear. I think if I\’d had chapters describing the chaos, the sudden flux of orphans when people started dying, the struggles the main character faced before suddenly being shoved into this mansion… it would have made more of an impact for me.

But again, I\’m not the target audience for this book. It\’s the kind of thing my near-twelve-year-old might gobble up. Except when I started to tell her about the premise (to see if she wanted to read it before I return it to the library) she said \”wait, so all these girls are getting raped by a rich guy?\” Well… they got married to him, but against their will, so yeah, rape. The whole idea of it is pretty distasteful once you start seeing past the descriptions of opulence hand-in-hand with oppression. However, as far as I read in the book, I didn\’t come across any sex scenes at all. The girls discuss consummation, who spent the night when with their husband, one of them gets pregnant, that\’s it. I can\’t be sure though- I started to feel distracted around thirty pages in, and just skimmed a bunch after that before ditching this one.

Abandoned 374 pages, 2011

more opinions:
Presenting Lenore
Rhapsody in Books
Dear Author
There\’s a Book

Tags: 0/5- Abandoned, Speculative Fiction, Young Adult

Fledgling

by Octavia Butler

The narrator wakes up alone, in the dark, with a severe head injury and a desperate hunger. She has no idea where she is, what has happened to her, or even her own name. She feeds on animals she catches (craving raw meat) and slowly healing, starts walking out of the forest. Gradually the names of items around her come back, and she starts to make sense of the world. But other things she cannot recall, so when she first meets a human she has no idea of their differences. She stumbles through the world unknowing, and so does the reader along with her.

She is Ina. An ancient species that lives by feeding on human blood, that cannot stand the daylight, that has extra-heightened senses and strength. Vampires, but not exactly the same as those in human folklore (even the characters in the book have misconceptions of the Ina). For example, they can’t convert humans into their own kind, they are not undead, they raise their young and live in family groups separated by gender. The main character here- who looks like she’s ten but in Ina years she’s over fifty- gradually learns about herself as she comes across others of her own kind. It\’s an urgent matter, because almost as soon as she discovers what she is and where her people are, she finds out that someone is very seriously trying to kill them, and maybe they are targeting her in particular. Because it turns out she’s not quite like the others of her kind. Her skin is darker and she can walk around in the daytime. She barely understands herself what these differences mean, but it’s very apparent that someone else finds them threatening.

I liked the idea behind this book, and the themes it explores. Especially how it showed the Ina creating symbiotic relationships with the people they fed on- becoming bonded, giving something of value to the humans in return. Their social structure is different from what I expected, and it takes the humans in the story time to adjust to that as well. Her first human partner is a grown man but oddly enough I didn’t find it disturbing to read descriptions of this to-all-appearances pre-pubescent girl being in such a relationship. I suppose because I expected a vampire story to be creepy or disturbing in some way. And this one doesn’t really have any gross factors. But the other reason might be because I never really felt connected to the characters, it never felt real or engaging. The prose often felt stiff, the descriptions were not of things that interested me, and even though the backstory and explanations came through other characters, it felt like they were just there to do that: lots of people standing around telling each other stuff, in the most deadpan ways. I admit I skipped an entire chapter in the middle because I was loosing interest, then picked up reading again and skimmed more near the end.

Read more about it in the reviews linked to below- I didn’t even tell you some of the more interesting points because I’m tired now.

Rating: 2/5

316 pages, 2005

more opinions:
Speculative Book Review
Savidge Reads
Rhapsody in Books
Literary Omnivore

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Current Reads, Speculative Fiction

Let the Right One In

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

This was intense. I saw the movie version a few years ago (subtitled). The first thing that struck me about the book was that it goes into far more detail (of course) about the characers, and there are lots of minor characters whose lives weave into the storyline, which the movie left out entirely. I liked that. The book also, aside from the bloodiness involved in a vampire story, shows the plain ugliness of human nature- especially those who are lonely, desperate, bored- much more than the movie did. Not far into it I was about to set it aside, not wanting to read about lonely, drunken men who are pedophiles or kids who beat each other up- but there were other parts of the story that interested me so I kept reading. There is a prominent thread in the story about bullying, for example. The main character, Oskar, is a lonely bitter kid with divorced parents and few friends. He gets picked on mercilessly at school and dreams of revenge, has a fascination with serial killers. After striking up a tentative friendship with the strange girl next door he learns how to stand up to the bullies. But they don\’t back down, they just come back at him harder…. meanwhile a series of mysterious murders are happening more and more frequently, and the whole neighborhood becomes tense and suspicious. By the time Oskar realizes what is going on he feels more inclined to protect his new friend than anything else. There\’s all kinds of subplots going on here- the teenager whose mother\’s new boyfriend is a policeman involved in searching for the murderer. The handful of drunken men who hang out together doing practically nothing- they get roped in when one of their gang disappears. I don\’t really know how to say more about this, but that the look at a lonely and dysfunctional society was more interesting to me than the vampire aspect of the story. In the end it got too brutal for my taste and I doubt I\’ll read this again. Definitely creepy.

This is a pretty famous book, and a lot of reviewers have done it more justice than I. See the links below for just a few.

Rating: 3/5 472 pages, 2004

more opinions:
You\’ve GOTTA Read This!
Novel Reflections
Avid Reader
Vishy\’s Blog
Book Monkey Scribbles
The Ranting Dragon

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Current Reads, General Fiction, Speculative Fiction

The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein

by Theodore Roszak

Roszak retells the story of Frankenstein from the viewpoint of Victor\’s unfortunate bride, Elizabeth. An inquisitive and intelligent young woman, she is taught by tutors in the household, and more particularly, by her adoptive mother the Lady Caroline. Her closeness to Victor is encouraged; more than just brother and sister, they are destined to marry and their union is (apparently) also part of some great experiment (which I could not make head or tails of, as you shall see). So… as part of her education Elizabeth learns to take no shame in her body and gets initiated into a secret cult of women which reveals to her all kinds of ancient female knowledge. I was blasting through the book, enjoying the writing and intrigued by the story until it got to a certain point. Elizabeth\’s gradual awareness of her sexuality was not repugnant to me, but things started to get really weird when Victor was included in some of the secret rites, which started to combine alchemy with eroticism. It was so bizarre. I thought alchemy had to do with turning stuff into gold? what does that have to do with sex? and all the obscure symbolism made no sense either and I got weary of trying to figure it out. The more interesting part of the story was the constant contrast between Victor\’s hunger for scientific knowledge- dissection, mathematics, the new discovery of electricity (we all know to what use he put that!)- and Elizabeth\’s blossoming understanding of the strengths of women- founded in the wonders of nature. But all that alchemy/mystic sex stuff was just too bewildering. It actually started to bore me. Who else has picked up this book? what did you make of it?

I am remember now and have no idea how this book got onto my TBR list. I think I read a review of it somewhere online that sparked my interest, but can\’t find that now. For a few other reader\’s opinions, check out the links below.

Abandoned…….. 425 pages, 1995

more opinions at:
Las Risas
somewhere i have never travelled
The Actress and the Bishop

Tags: 0/5- Abandoned, Speculative Fiction

House of Stairs

by William Sleator

Five orphaned teens of widely differing personalities find themselves unwillingly involved in a behavioral experiment. They\’re all placed in a House of Stairs– an environment made up of staircases, small landings, occasional bridges- no walls, no floor, no place to feel safe. There\’s a small computer that flashes colors and dispenses food- but only in response to certain actions. Which they have to decipher by guesswork- and the results become more and more bizarre, until the kids are barely holding onto their sanity. I read this book a long time ago as a teen and it really made an impression on me. The characters are a bit flat and stereotypical, but the dynamics of their interactions and the different ways they respond to the challenges they face make it an interesting read. It really gave me the shivers back then, but now I want to read it just to pick apart what made some of the kids come out of it okay, and the others drive themselves to disintegration.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 166 pages, 1974

More opinions at:
Journeys with Books
Reading is My Superpower
Opinions of a Wolf

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Juvenile Fic, Past Reads, Speculative Fiction

Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

There is something about Margaret Atwood\’s books that both fascinates and repels me. I found The Handmaid\’s Tale to be chilling, in a remote way. Cat\’s Eye was terribly dismal and depressing to me. And Oryx and Crake gave me the creeps- but at the same time I simply could not put it down. It is a horrifying vision of the future- a future in which humankind has altered the face of the world beyond belief. The effects of global warming are only a sidenote here; popultation growth beyond control causing a huge rift between the wealthy and poor, spawning violence and crime alongside ruthless pursuit of scientific answers to all problems. Genetic engineering and other kinds of tinkering has created things like pigs that grow human organs, fake boulders that water your lawn, babies with chosen characteristics. And society\’s utter moral degredation. It all eventually falls into chaos, until a man who calls himself Snowman is the only real human being left, alongside a group of genetically altered people who are impervious to many ills- sunburn, disease, hunger (they eat grass). Jealousy, hate, love? humor? There\’s not a lot left to make them human, so many things in their brains have been rewired by the scientist Crake. Who was once Snowman\’s childhood friend.

The main character in this story is Snowman and his younger self, Jimmy. The plot follows him through his daily struggle to survive in the present altered and (to him) harsh new environment, full of dangerous wildlife and killing heat. He starts off on a journey back to the ruins of civilization for supplies, on the way reminiscing on his childhood and all the events that led up to the final disaster- how he watched the world change and the part he played in key events.

And now a word about what frustrated me; skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers. I found some things in this book really disturbing. Namely, the blatant s-x everywhere, and how the boys would watch violence (executions, suicides, killing of animals etc) for entertainment. I suppose this was to show how far society had gone, but it was pretty sickening. And I really didn\’t understand why Jimmy was so drawn to Oryx. For a character with such an important role, there wasn\’t much told about her, and she hardly felt real to me. Perhaps she was meant to remain a mystery. Then the ending of the book drove me crazy, because I got excited just as Snowman did, and hoped in those final pages to see a confrontation or discovery of some kind, and I got- nothing. For the first time I wanted to throw a book across the room! But then I found out that her upcoming book Year of The Flood, is a sequel to this one, so maybe my questions will be answered. I\’m going to wait a while before I read it, though. I can\’t take this kind of heavy stuff one book after another.

Rating: 4/5 …….. 376 pages, 2003

More opinions:
Shelf Love
Book Maven\’s Blog

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Current Reads, Speculative Fiction

The Animal Wife

by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

I have a hard time thinking what to say about The Animal Wife. It is a companion novel to Reindeer Moon, telling about the same group of prehistoric people, also a coming-of-age story, but about a young man this time. Kori, the main character, sets off on a journey to live with his father\’s people after having spent his childhood with his mother. He is eager to prove himself a man, and earn his place. He is just beginning to find his place among the grown men when he makes a brash move and takes captive a woman from an unknown tribe. His rash action condemns his new \”wife\” to live among total strangers- but also makes Kori something of an outcast himself, and places his own family group in danger…

It was hard for me to like Kori. He gave little consideration to what his captive wife might be feeling, and was mostly concerned with hunting, his status among the men, and his enjoyment of women. Women in this primitive society were pretty much regarded as possessions, without will or rights of their own. I suppose it might well have been like that so many thousands of years ago, but still it made me feel awful how callously some of them were treated in the story. I did like reading about how closely tied the people were to the land, how their lives depended upon the weather, change of seasons, movements of animals. Their constant interactions with wildlife. But it wasn\’t nearly as magical as Reindeer Moon, and at the end of the book I was left thinking: what a desolate story. In the epilogue the author explained how her story was based on ancient Asian legends of an animal wife- think fox, in Japanese literature- and for a moment I had to think why, because unlike Reindeer Moon where people died and their spirits took different animal forms, in this story the woman never became an animal (although I expected her to!) No, she was seen as an animal because her captors in ignorance treated her as one, they assumed she was stupid because she could not speak their language or understand their customs. It was really very sad. I was pleased at first to see the reappearance of the tamed-wolf theme, but it did not end well even for the poor wolf. Everyone was left with less in the end. And yet I could not put the book down… Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is a darn good storyteller.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 289 pages, 1990

more opinions:
Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Current Reads, Speculative Fiction

Reindeer Moon

by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

I\’ve read a few of this author\’s non-fiction books, but I had no idea she wrote fiction until I picked up Reindeer Moon, a story set twenty thousand years ago in a cold northern region of forest and steppes. Like Clan of the Cave Bear, it\’s full of harsh realities and bitter struggles for survival, especially when it comes to people\’s interactions. In Thomas\’ novel, the people are so few that one individual\’s error or misdeed can jeapordize the entire group. The main character is a young woman named Yanan, who after a streak of catastrophic events finds herself alone with her younger sister, traveling through the wilderness to try and find her people again. They take shelter in an old abandoned lodge, only to find a mother wolf has made it her den. For a time they co-exist with the wolf and its cub. In this incident and the following events, I could see a scenario arising of how the first wolf was tamed. Only it didn\’t happen in the span of the book- which rather disappointed me, but also made it more realistic; I think the development of a partnership with animals would probably have taken more than one person\’s lifetime. I also really liked (of course) parts of the story where when a person died, their spirit could take on the form of an animal- and at times the spirit would just live the animal\’s life, forgetting what it had originally set out to do in that form. It was really interesting to see the different animal perspectives: deer, lion, bear, owl etc. The first time it happened I was surprised: wait, she\’s a wolf now? but then I eagerly awaited the person-into-animal moments.

Anyway, I\’m getting off track. The wolf thing was not the focus of the story, although I found it fascinating. It\’s mostly about Yanan\’s efforts to live her life the way she wants to- sometimes against the tenants of her society. Not nearly as dramatic (or rich in detail) as Clan of the Cave Bear (which I couldn\’t help comparing it to, as one of the few other novels I\’ve read set in prehistory) but full of grim realities- death in childbirth is common, many children never survive to adulthood, winter brings starvation, people fight over food and mates, illness and injury go ignored. It was sometimes hard to read descriptions of them suffering in ways which the reader knew were totally preventable but the characters were ignorant of. Often the people acted totally callous towards each other. And yet they were also skillful, manipulative and imaginative- very human. This is one of the few books I\’ve ever read where in the society arranged marriages made complete sense- the population was so small, and life so risky, the people had to carefully choose who joined with whom. Resistance to these arrangements could cause lots of turmoil …. Reindeer Moon is a story of a woman growing up, learning some hard lessons in a very harsh land, a book about nature and nurture, about discovery and loss…

This book reminded me of so many others. The part where the girl and her sister are struggling to survive alone brought to mind Into the Forest. The way they came to live in the wolf\’s den made me think of Incident at Hawk\’s Hill. The closeness to nature, paired with brutality and a sense of wonder, echoed themes of An Imaginary Life. Needless to say, I really enjoyed this book and I\’m eager to get my hands on the companion novel, The Animal Wife. (I\’m hoping it continues to speculate, even as backdrop to the main events, how someone tamed a wolf…)

I read this book for the TBR Challenge

Rating: 4/5 …….. 336 pages, 1987

more opinions:
Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Tags: Current Reads, Speculative Fiction

Tag: Speculative Fiction

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